This is a problem I have actually had for a while, but it never really affected much that I considered important. Now it is just getting annoying.

Basically, certain video players and online games do not work. Most video players outside of YouTube will not work. The player will load, but the video never does. For example, the most recent video I have had trouble with is the Nickelodeon video player for The Legend of Korra. When I try to watch that, I get a black box, and a “Loading” type image pops up, swirls around once, and then disappears. After that, the whole thing becomes unresponsive. This is typical of many, but not all, video players I have encountered on the web.

I am not sure if it is related, but I have also had trouble with various games. Often time, they will work fine until reaching some transition point, such as the end of a level, and then they will become unresponsive. A good example here is the game Bloons Tower Defense 4. This is a game I know was responsive on my older system. But now, when it loads the level, it freezes up before loading the available towers to place and becomes otherwise unresponsive.An example is shown below. The top-left question mark box in the right-hand sidebar should reveal a dart monkey, and my starting money should be filled, but instead the game hangs up. I have had similar hang-ups on a number of games, so I am certain the problem is not just with this game.

As I said, I have had this problem for a while now. I have upgraded both Flash and my browsers a number of times since they started. I have these problems in all my browsers (Safari, Opera, Camino, Firefox), so it seems to be a problem with Flash. I have also tried uninstalling and re-installing flash and disabling all other browser plug-ins.

This is odd. I know you mentioned that you uninstalled/reinstalled Flash, did you also clear your Flash cache to see if that helped? Any chance you're running a system level ad blocker/proxy like Glimmer?

Clearing the Flash cache didn’t work. I am not using any proxy. I have had this problem on at least two different wireless networks, whereas my brother (running Mac Leopard) has not.

I do not have a system wide ad blocker. Though I have recently installed AdBlock Plus on Firefox. But my problem predates that and would not explain the misbehavior in other browsers.

On an unrelated side note, my post above has just gotten smooshed to the right side for some reason. Only about 110px wide. After playing around with Firebug for a little bit, it looks like setting “clear: left” on class jive-thread-post-message clears it up. It appears to be clashing with the floated "jive-thread-post-details-tags" span by just a few pixels.

Ok, I think the next step would be to give our 11.3 beta 3 release a try and if that doesn't solve the problem, go ahead and enter a new bug report at bugbase.adobe.com. Please be aware though that we're going to need to be able to reproduce this problem to have a shot at fixing it. I suspect you've got something different about your system and we'll need to figure out what it is.

First I want to mention that for unrelated reasons, I upgraded to Mac Lion over the weekend. (Yeah, the timing is a little off, what with the chance to jump to Mountain Lion in a few months, but sometimes thise things just work out that way.) Anyway, the upgrade did not solve the problem. So whatever the problem is, it is not limited to Snow Leopard.

The beta update didn’t work either. I don’t know how much help the bug report will be, since I have no idea what information could help this behavior be repeated. Does Flash keep any sort of program logs anywhere that could be helpful?

I did get error messages. Both Korra and BTD featured errors about being unable to create SharedObjects. Korra’s also said it was having trouble with FlashCookie. So I tried playing around with my browser’s cookie settings—particularly third-party cookies. But that didn’t help.

Strange thing, though. After playing around with the cookie settings for a while, the error messages for BTD got switched around a bit , and then the game gave me an in-game error about being unable to contact Mochi Games, which is used by NinjaKiwi to manage a number of features for users that participate in the larger community. Strangely enough, after this, BTD started working. Unfortunately, after restarting my browser, I was unable to reliably replicate this.

Anyway, here are the error messages I received:

Korra:

An ActionScript Error occured:

Error: Error #2134: Cannot create SharedObject.

at flash.net::SharedObject$/getLocal()

at com.mtvnet.mediaplayer.util::FlashCookie()

at com.mtvnet.mediaplayer.util::FlashCookie$/getLocal()

at SavedPreferences()

at com.mtvnservices.media.as3player.model.configuration::ConfigurationProxy()

at com.mtvnservices.media.as3player.model.application::ApplicationProxy/onStageReady()

at com.mtvnservices.media.as3player.model.application::ApplicationProxy/onAddedToStage()

These errors make me think that Flash is having problems writing to the folder were the Flash cookies are stored (LSO, sharedobject). On the Mac, this is

~\Library\Preferences\Macromedia\Flash Player\

~\Library\Caches\Adobe\Flash Player\

Can you check the permissions for these folders? You might want to run verify permissions on your drive (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1452) then delete the ~\Library\Preferences\Macromedia folder and the ~\Library\Caches\Adobe\Flash Player folder.

Hey, it is getting them to work. Although I still have the “URL Not Found” error on BTD, and I get a whole different debugger error on Korra. But none of the errors prevent the associated items from working. Hopefully this will work in the other places I have had trouble with.

It could be you are just running into known exceptions with the applicaitons. If you're able to get further now, I'd suggest uninstalling the debug version of the player and reinstalling the release version.